It's always good to see our buddy Mike Drake - product specialist and media liaison extraordinaire - at the Mezco Toyz booth during Toy Fair. As usual, he gave us a great tour of their booth, and we were sure to shoot a few high res images of their products before we made tracks. I was especially excited by their new Panthro figure! Click through the image of Panthro below to check out their full gallery, and see the video with the rest of their new stuff!

I usually end up with a favorite photo from each show that I cover, and this year I think it is of the ZombieZoo crew! Click through the image for the gallery and video of their booth, and consider bringing home one of their undead plush!

Some nights a person rushes straight home to continue their Toy Fair coverage and other studious and important tasks, and some nights they go see their mild mannered co-worker play Rockabilly tunes in a local dive bar for 3 hours. Last night was that second choice - more updates from the show coming soon!

Phew! I guess I managed to get even more fun coverage than I had realized during my short time at the show. I've just finished posting my content up through Sunday, and I'm up to about 65 galleries - though that includes the multiples I did for Hasbro, Lego, Bandai and Mattel. Here are a few of the new highlights:

Over 700 of you have enjoyed the video so far, now you can see the high res images! I admit that I'm actually pretty happy with how some of these came out - now and then the hand is steady and the light is good! NECA is doing such fine work this year, and their gallery was a real joy to tour. The Rocky figures are some of the stars of the show, the Nightmare on Elm Street line is expertly crafted, care and attention and fandom is evident in the E.T. and Gremlins lines, and their video game licenses are exquisitely rendered as always. Click through the amazing Freddy below to check out their gallery.

Finally - all of the Lego galleries are up! If there was something you were looking for that is coming out in 2012, do have a look through our stills and videos, and I bet you can find it! Click the image below to go to the index of all Lego galleries from Toy Fair 2012.

My characteristically slow posting of content from the recently completed Toy Fair may lead some to believe that I either had a lousy time there, or saw nothing further worth reporting. Well - neither of those things could be further from the truth! In fact I have pictures and video from a number of cool companies, both large and small, that I cannot wait to share and add to the archive of the show. However, this past weekend I had some business in New Jersey, and managed to completely accidentally stumble on a simply astonishing pinball museum!

Called, appropriately enough, the Silver Ball Museum, it is situated on the recovering Asbury Park boardwalk and is a must-visit. Youtube has a number of walk through videos, some of which thankfully are of better quality than my own, but in my enthusiasm I simply had to shoot a little mediocre video to share with everyone!

The Lego galleries are underway, and our massive Lego City photo set has just gone up. Have a look, won't you?

And while you're at it, you should have a look at Lego Creator too. This line always includes a passel of fun sets, and 2012 is no exception! You get a dinosaur, a beach house, a fancy helicopter, a Goliath style flatbed truck and payload - lots of good stuff! As usual, my hope would be to go back through the galleries at some point and annotate next to the key images the set number and name that is pictured - but we'll see how far I get this year!

Good gracious, I finally have gotten all of the 29 galleries from the Hasbro showroom posted to our Toy Fair 2012 coverage, along with crosslinked video for everything I was able to shoot - which was most of them! I'm pretty happy with how it came out, so do click through and browse around to any galleries that may catch your fancy.

Still more Hasbro galleries for your viewing pleasure - because there are a ton of them and I'm not done yet! Be sure to check out RZA as Blind Master, and the bladed hat that he specifically requested to be included with his action figure! Also don't miss the Kre-O Battleship sets - which I think lend themselves much better to this building system than the Transformers of last (and this) year.

The image galleries are finally starting to crawl their way onto the site - starting in chronological order, as always, with our visit to the Hasbro showroom! I'm going alphabetically, so you can see a few shots of the Avengers display, along with my wonderfully cross-linked video - a feature I'm trying to include with nearly all galleries going forward!

Well I only went to two days of the show proper this year, but I think that this, my second and final day on the show floor, was enormously productive and fun! That being said, it'll be tomorrow before any image galleries start to get built, so for today let's have a look at several more movies from the earlier parts of the event.

Diamond Select - Horror Figures - I didn't know that Zach Oat, a famous name in these parts, was working for Diamond now, but he gave me a great run through the horror lines that Diamond is focusing on for 2012:

Lego - Lord of the Rings - The sets people have been excited to finally see:

While Saturday always starts off pretty gently, with just a visit to Hasbro (albeit a long, marathon one) Sunday arrives like a lion with the 7am Lego onslaught, and doesn't stop until Mattel has trotted out their He-Man figures that afternoon at 3. In between, my new tradition seems to be a solid trip to Bandai, and peppering in whatever else I can between those appointments along the way. It's shaping up that my early content is taking the form of videos this year - but hey, you always have to try new things right? I still have a total raft of images to deal with - never fear - but they just haven't made it up to the site just quite yet.

As an additional note - I also got a tour through the Bandai Thundercats display, which I recorded, but which is upside down - fix is underway for that one! But - there was basically nothing new, except for a very cool Mumm-Ra Coffin Cruiser tank vehicle. Looks like they have pretty much ended the line, but wanted to still represent the brand at the show - so that answers that. Posted by charlie on February 12th 2012, 09:21 PMLeave CommentShare

Hey folks - the first official-unofficial day of Toy Fair is in the can, and we have seen all the great stuff that Hasbro had to show us for 2012. The internet is aflame with coverage from all points, I am sure, but I still do try to add something to the conversation! As usual, it's 2am and I'm still sorting through photos, but what I did this year was to try to carefully shoot about a minute of video of each of the 'booths' in the Hasbro gallery. I figure this way, there should be a little something for everyone, and hopefully if my pictures aren't perfect, or in this case are typically late, that at least there's a moving image to fill in the gaps! Most of the videos are posted to youtube, and I've embedded some of the more interesting ones below - enjoy!

We had a fantastic time at the Toy Tokyo party this evening, featuring the Four Horsemen and their astonishing work on the Outer Space Men line. Also featured were a host of amazing custom figures by various artists in the toy world, and a gorgeous and nearly priceless retrospective of the rare, MOC series 1 and 2 collection of the original Outer Space Men was on display.

Also of interest was the Four Horsemen creator edition OSM repants - to be released later this year - and the first public reveal of the Glyos Hub set!

Hey, I bought four of them, so let's have a look at the next figure in the series - Autobot Ratchet! (or, Ratchet, to his friends). I'll never cease to be amused by the efforts that Hasbro has to go to so that they can trademark names like Hound and Ratchet - I just wish they could be a little more creative, I mean, why not? Like GunBustin' Ratchet! Electro-Scalpel Wizard Ratchet! Ah well, there's probably reasons why they can't do that either. Just know that Ratchet here is one of the rarer figures in this first wave of 'Series 2' of Legion class figures - why not pick one up today?

Ok, Toy Fair may be only a few short days away, but this morning I managed to score the first figures I've seen from the new Transformers: Prime series, and am delighted to feature them! DoctorKent and I puzzled over the strange 'Series 2' marking on the back of this new line of Cyberverse Legion figures, but finally decided that they are simply extending the 'Series 1' set from the Dark of the Moon movie line. Looks like they may be stretching the Cyberverse brand across the different years and incarnations that we will see going forward. Of course, confirming this at the show will be some sort of priority, to be sure!

As always, click through the image below to check out the latest bio and stats for the rarest of rare Transformers, a girl one! Maybe Hasbro will announce "Transformers: Friends" at the show...I mean, we got Kre-o last year.

Can you believe that it's almost time for another Toy Fair?! I sure can't - and I had better get my act together around here and start getting geared up for it! Thankfully I've been with-it enough off and on for the past few months to secure meetings and interviews with the companies we all want to learn about this time of year: Hasbro, Mattel, Lego, Bandai, Mezco Toyz, Jazwares, Zombie Zoo, Planetary Pals - all the greats!

What served as a very timely and welcome reminder of just how imminent is the show were the arrival of our badges to the Lego event. Always held at the crack of dawn on Sunday, before the show gets underway for the opening day, this event is something of a tradition among the toy press, and is always a hilarious combination of fatigue, hangover and regret, tempered with the excitement of seeing some new product and chatting with the reps and 'master builders' I only get to see once a year. I'm especially amused that the badge this year (which I BETTER NOT FORGET) pays direct homage to this outlandish hour, and promises a reward for our early diligence!

The back of the badge is where the action really is, with two bricks actually glued in place, ready to accept the two exclusive, sneak peek figures that we will get on that day! I'm crossing my fingers for Harley Quinn and Gimli, but I won't hold my breath!

While I am sort of Bumblebee'd-out thanks to the Snake Eyes treatment he has received in the last three movie line product onslaughts, I will admit that seeing the classic G1 figure does still, and will always, bring a smile to my face. It will always immediately bring me back to a simpler, better time where my still-forming mind was introduced to the concept of transforming robots, and where my dad had a 1963 VW Beetle no less! Well, to re-capture at least a little of that feeling, here is the G1 Bumblebee figure from the Transformers Titanium line from a few years back. Click through the pic for the bio and stats that were found along with this small, tough figure.

Wow, another weekend is upon us! Hard to believe, so let's celebrate with another dashing Canne'pirate from Bah'glenn Creations! Rig'n is another amazingly creative figure, the likes of which should put Mattel and Hasbro to shame. Bah'glenn has yet to discover an official bio for this figure in Captain Spakk Jahroh's Log Book, but I suspect such things will emerge in the fullness of time.

Let's have a look at the next member of the Canne'pirate crew - Lokk'up! This fearsome figure is the living treasure chest of the band of buccaneers, and will digest anything he doesn't deem worthy of saving! Click through the image below for more pics and bio of this single-run, super detailed, most expressive character from the depths of Bag'glenn studios!

One of our very favorite bizarre, obscure titles that is a must-play during every trip to Funspot is Radical Radial. Well, this game about an anthropomorphic tire and its adventures has just turned up on eBay - a rare occurence to be sure! It seems that, even for $500, you still get a broken version of this game which is just as well since it will likely keep us from buying it. Still, what a cool title to have in the collection! Click through the image below to check out the sale for yourself, and if you're up for some board repair, think about making it yours!